The invention relates to a method for planning and/or configuring a project, which includes an automation device to control a technical installation. The project data required for planning and/or configuring the installation is stored in an engineering system. The invention further relates to an engineering system for planning and/or configuring a project.
Such a method is known in the related art from Siemens catalog ST PCS 7, chapter 1, issue 2001. A process control system for controlling a technical installation has an engineering system, which is provided, in particular, to configure hardware and/or software components, to design communication networks, to design continuous and sequential process flows, to design control and monitoring strategies, and to prepare recipes for batch processes. The required project data for planning and/or configuring a project, which represents the automation device to be designed, can be stored, for example, in a memory of a programming unit or a server. The programming units involved in the planning and/or configuration in a multi-user operation can access this common memory. Because the project data are centrally stored, they can be very voluminous depending on the complexity of the automation device. Furthermore, during planning in a so-called multi-user operation, particularly if many designers simultaneously compete for access to the centrally stored project data via the network, substantial performance problems and long response times may occur. Today, the designer is therefore often forced to copy parts of the project data from the total project data to his own programming unit, to plan decentrally without the context of the total project, and then to reintegrate these parts into the total project. These planning steps are prone to errors, and the handling of the data and subsequent correction of the total project data is labor intensive. Furthermore, matching the engineering data of the automation systems, the control and monitoring systems, and the batch systems can only be done in the context of the total project data. This matching is usually very time consuming and involves a project-wide interruption of the planning work.